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Just because your business may be small doesn't mean what others think of you is a small part of doing business. It’s everything.

A powerful first step in establishing credibility, customer reviews, endorsements and recommendations help to break down natural barriers and distrust people feel with an unfamiliar entity. Third party opinions help to instill confidence in others who would use your services as well as lessen skepticism, sometimes getting them one step closer to filling out your web site contact form.

When someone with no economic interest says something good about you, others tend to sit up and take notice, even though they may have no real reason to trust that person’s opinion. Habitually deleting blatantly commercial messages from our inboxes and chucking print ads that get stuffed into our snail mailboxes, we undeniably remain suckers for the human touch. Make no mistake. We still swoon when reading the conversational tone used in print when others “talk” to us about the merits of doing business with someone else. Warm fuzzies well up within us to read about the satisfaction another person felt when he or she paid for a job well done. And we give thanks to higher entities at the revelation that there are people out there who will go the extra mile.

As a professional copywriter, one of the first things I look for when writing about a client for marketing purposes is a list of their professional endorsements. No longer boring readers with yesteryear's tedious “letters of recommendation,” today's endorsements are merely a few sentences or short paragraphs capable of offering others a sense of what someone else who has been there and done that has to say about you.

While the most convincing testimonials are unsolicited, adding a tab to your web site reserved for nothing but testimonials and endorsements from ANY source not only makes your site user-friendlier, but can also result in more business through search engine placement. Locations for these mini-testimonials are not restricted to one page of your web site, however. That contact form page I mentioned earlier? A credible, well-written testimonial placed next to the contact form can become the kicker a visitor needs to influence a call to action. A word of caution: be careful with the quality of the testimonials you use. Low quality testimonials are those with no names, no dates indicating how old the quote may be, no traceable identities (initials only or no names at all) and no locations listed, while high-quality ones contain all the necessary information to make your endorsements both real and enduring.

You can take testimonials to the next level by interviewing your clients and posting either a written transcript or a video of their success stories on your website. Success stories are really just amplified testimonials, similar to case studies, but reflecting only the good stuff. According to Lee Polevoi in Intuit.com’ s article, What’s Your Business G-Cred?,“If you’re a consultant or heading a small consulting business, it’s no longer enough to have a web presence.” Polevoi goes on to explain that as a small business person you must establish your G-cred – your “Google credibility” -- the information (links, images, and other data) about you people receive when they search Google for their names, businesses, products, or organizations, providing a measure of legitimacy and influencing how seriously potential clients, vendors, and employees take you. This includes numerous, enthusiastic professional recommendations as well as a thriving blog relating to your professional skills to boost your G-cred.

Getting started is easier than you might think. Linkedinis one of the best places to begin. On your Linkedin profile page, a link permits you to ask selected LinkedIn connections to endorse you. If you’d rather not use their canned, pre-worded request, think up one of your own, such as, “To enhance my business profile, I am contacting clients and friends who have used my services in the past to endorse me by writing a few lines about their (hopefully positive) experiences. I appreciate your input and will gladly return the favor.”

If you do hire a copywriter, he or she can conduct phone interviews to get these important tidbits of praise. Like everything else in marketing, however, it's a numbers game. Whether you get help or not, you won’t get responses from everyone you ask, since most people are time-zapped, hate to write or simply don’t know what to write. But you’ll get some, and you can copy and use those same testimonials on your web site, on your Facebookbusiness info page, on profile pages for networking organizations you belong to, on your printed bio, mentioned in press releases, added to resumes, and use them to make veritable art forms of Linkedin profiles.

The key is not to worry about offending or inconveniencing people by asking. Testimonials are used all the time by large companies – on TV commercials, in print ads, and (just in case you haven’t noticed it) by political candidates. If corporate giants care little about imposing on people when they ask for these endorsements, why should you? The great thing about collecting these mini-pots of gold is, even though you should continue to request them of both current and past clients, the ones you get can live on forever in our ever-present cyber-world.